A Second Splitting
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Aristophanes — καὶ διώξει ἔρως ὄνομα. καὶ πρὸ τοῦ, ὥσπερ λέγω, ἓν ἦμεν, νυνὶ δὲ διὰ τὴν ἀδικίαν διῳκίσθημεν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ, καθάπερ Ἀρκάδες ὑπὸ Λακεδαιμονίων. φόβος οὖν ἔστιν, ἐὰν μὴ κόσμιοι ὦμεν πρὸς τοὺς θεούς, ὅπως μὴ καὶ αὖθις διασχισθησόμεθα, καὶ περίιμεν ἔχοντες ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν ταῖς στήλαις καταγραφὴν ἐκτετυπωμένοι, διαπεπρισμένοι κατὰ τὰς ῥῖνας, γεγονότες ὥσπερ λίσπαι. ἀλλὰ τούτων ἕνεκα πάντʼ ἄνδρα χρὴ ἅπαντα παρακελεύεσθαι εὐσεβεῖν περὶ
...and pursuit, Eros is the name. And before this, as I say, we were one, but now, because of our wrongdoing we were dispersed by the god, just as the Arcadians were by the Spartans. There is a fear, then, if we are not orderly toward the gods, that we may be split apart again, and go about looking like those stamped in outline on the gravestones, sawn through along the nose, become like tally-tokens. But for these reasons every single man must exhort to be pious concerning—
Continuing directly from 192e's account of the longing to be fused into one, the sentence completes here: Eros is the name for that pursuit. Aristophanes then draws a real historical analogy — humans were divided by Zeus as the Arcadians were once dispersed by the Spartans — and warns that further impiety risks a second splitting, reducing us to the sawn profile-figures on gravestones or worn tally-tokens. The sentence runs on into 193b, where the exhortation to piety and Eros as ἡγεμὼν καὶ στρατηγός follow.
Aristophanes reaches for a political term to describe what a god did to the human race: dioikizō is the standard word for scattering a single city into separate villages, the reverse of synoikismos, the merger by which villages become one city (the process Athens credited to Theseus). Zeus does to humanity what Sparta did to a real Arcadian city: dissolve one settlement into many. The comparison is oddly exact for a myth. Sparta's actual dismantling of Mantineia into its outlying villages happened in 385 BC, a generation after the dramatic date of this dinner party in 416. Whether that is a slip or a wink from Plato writing decades later, the effect is the same: the political present keeps showing through the mythic past, and the threat Aristophanes issues next — be pious or risk a second dioikismos — lands on his own Athenian audience as much as on the reunited lovers in the story.
The punishment he imagines literalizes a word he has already used. At 191d each half of a split human is called a symbolon, a matching token: in ordinary Greek life a symbolon was one half of a broken bone, coin, or sherd, kept by guest-friends or contracting parties so that fitting the two halves together again, years later, would prove the bond between them. Here the same object turns up debased: the λίσπαι, the worn dice-halves the sawn figures resemble, are a symbolon gone wrong — a matching half with no one left to match it to, cut not for a private recognition but stamped flat and anonymous on a gravestone. The gravestone image is exact in its own right: Greek stelae carried low-relief profile figures of the dead, and a face split down the nose is the one cut that would ruin such a portrait completely. Aristophanes is not only threatening pain; he is threatening to turn the myth's one hopeful image — the token that finds its match — into a monument with no match left to find.
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